The Victorian minister for education recently released the news that all Victorian state schools will embrace systematic synthetic phonics starting next year as the government tries to improve reading levels in prep to year two students across the state.
The government has announced an updated Teaching and Learning Model for all government schools to be implemented next year, which focuses on what’s known as explicit teaching. Students from Prep to Year 2 will be taught reading using systematic synthetic phonics, which helps students break up words into individual sounds. Teachers will spend at least 25 minutes a day explicitly teaching phonics and phonemic awareness in classrooms.
At Heathdale, we believe that every person is special and unique, made in the image of God, so we provide learning that supports each of our students in finding his or her individual, God-given potential. We support the direction the Victorian Government took as we believe Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) assists every child in becoming confident in reading, writing and spelling.
The College has already started on the journey, having prepared the transition to Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) in 2023 by training our staff in the Little Learners Love Literacy (LLLL) Systematic Synthetic Phonics in 2024. The teaching staff completed a 2-day training course, which will have a pronounced impact on the reading instruction for our students.
This curriculum is founded on research and covers phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Little Learners Love Literacy is divided into seven stages to effectively teach children the 44 sounds of the English alphabet in a specific order.
Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) is built on the alphabetic principle. It is a structured, cumulative, multi-sensory and evidence-based method of teaching reading whereby students are taught the link between letters and the speech sounds they represent. Our students learn that sounds (phonemes) are represented by letters (graphemes).
We teach children that phonemes can be blended or ‘synthesised’ to form words. Systematic Synthetic Phonics is a bottom-up approach in that instruction starts not with whole words but with the most basic sound unit, the phoneme. The reading process involves decoding or ‘breaking’ words into separate sounds that are blended together to read an unknown word.
At Heathdale Christian College, children learn how blending and segmenting words is reversible; if you can read a word (decoding), you can spell it (encoding)!
"Explicit teaching of alphabetic decoding skills is helpful for all children, harmful for none, and crucial for some." C. Snow and C. Juel (2005) Harvard Graduate School of Education.
At Heathdale Christian College, we introduce a few high-frequency words (HFW) frequently appearing in print. They may be regular or irregular, deviating from common phonics patterns (e.g. said, my, is, was, are). HFW are words that children need to 'learn by heart' initially, as they cannot decode them yet. As we move through the Little Learners Love Literacy Systematic Synthetic Phonics program, many of these HFW (known as ‘heart words’) will become decodable as our children learn more alphabetic code.
Teachers utilise the concept of "Orthographic Mapping" to explain how written words become ingrained in our brains. Orthographic Mapping is a technique skilled readers employ to imprint written words into our lexicon, which serves as our brain's repository for letter formations and patterns.
This process allows us to effortlessly recall a word or letter without decoding it repeatedly. Once a word is decoded, with a solid grasp of its sounds and strong phonics understanding, it is then mapped and stored in our long-term memory.
It’s important to note that written words are not stored in visual memory, and learning to read is not a visual undertaking. Instead, storing printed words in our long-term memory is the crucial process that all proficient readers utilise to become fluent in reading.
Therefore, we do not encourage children to guess an unknown word’s identity based on pictures, context, or the word’s first letter. We encourage them to use their letter sound knowledge to decode it.
Why teach using Systematic Synthetic Phonics?
Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols to construct or derive meaning (reading comprehension). Our brains are not hard-wired to read, and it is not a straightforward process of lifting the words off the page or learning by exposure to rich text.
Phonemic awareness and systematic synthetic phonics instruction help students use the alphabetic principle to learn relationships between written language letters and spoken language sounds. The English language has complicated spelling patterns or a deep orthography, meaning many letters can have multiple sounds associated with them.
English has 26 letters but 44 unique sounds. Our synthetic phonics approach at Heathdale Christian College will teach these 44 sounds from simple to complicated. Using synthetic phonics gives children the skills to crack the code!
For more information, please see below for a couple of excellent clips by Alison Clarke, a well-known Melbourne Speech Pathologist.
Preventing literacy failure and shifting the whole Bell Curve up
Shared by Alison Clarke, https://www.spelfabet.com.au/
Sound out words; don't memorise and guess!
Shared by Alison Clarke, https://www.spelfabet.com.au/